China is victim of hacking attacks

08:16, June 05, 2013

China has been the target of serious cyberattacks from the United States, but Beijing has never blamed Washington or the Pentagon because such accusations would be "technically irresponsible", Chinese Internet insiders said.

The cyberattacks from the US have been as grave as the ones the US claims China has conducted, they said on Tuesday.

China’s Internet emergency response agency has tried its best to handle all the US complaints made this year, they said.

However, the US never mentioned the alleged Chinese hacking theft of the designs of more than 20 kinds of top US weapons, but instead gave the unverified information directly to the media.

"We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse the US, but it’s not helpful in solving the problem," said Huang Chengqing, director of the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China, also known as CNCERT.

"The importance of handling Internet security cases keeps rising, but the issue can only be settled through communication, not confrontation."

Huang’s remarks came after a slew of reports accusing China of hacking were released in the US this year. High-ranking officials in Washington also pressed Beijing on the issue in recent weeks.

According to CNCERT, in the first five months of this year, 13,408 overseas trojan horses or bot control servers — two popular hacking tools — hijacked around 5.63 million mainframes in China. Of those, 4,062 US-based control servers hijacked 2.91 million mainframes in China.

The US ranked first in both the number of control servers and the number of mainframes controlled in China.

In the same period, websites of 249 important Chinese organizations including government departments, key information systems and research institutions were implanted with backdoor programs. Among them, 54 websites were hijacked by US-based IP addresses for stealing information.